Sport

STUDENT SPORT: IS THERE ANY POINT LEFT?

By Editor-in-Chief ⋅ February 4, 2008 ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

STUDENT SPORT: IS THERE ANY POINT LEFT?

Paul O’Leary

University sport has seen much change in recent years; higher education institutions (HEIs) have invested considerable sums of money towards improving their national sporting status.
This has been done by introducing strategies that have been common place within national governing bodies of sports and government agencies such as Sport England and UK Sport, but only a few select universities… until now.

It is no secret that Loughborough has long been the county’s leading sporting institution and topped the British University Sports Association (BUSA) rankings as long as they have existed. It would take a level of investment only seen in Premier League Football to overhaul them. They are home to numerous national centres of excellence and have unrivalled expertise available in Sports Science, medicine, strength & conditioning and the technical analysis of sport. Inevitably, this attracts the best young athletes from home and abroad.

So, what does this mean for the remaining UK HEIs? Others have tried to follow suit in the pursuit of excellence; The University of Bath have come as close as anyone in recent times. In reality, though, and in terms of BUSA points scored, they are not actually anywhere near close.

This begs the question, if no other university has a genuine opportunity of toppling Loughborough’s dominance then what is the point of investing large sums of money into university sport as many institutions have since the year 2000? Obviously the advent of top up fees has had some impact upon this, but shouldn’t there be other priorities?

As an ex-student sport officer, I too pondered this question and put forward a justification to the vice-chancellor of my university as to why a large injection of cash into sport was required. Of course my reasons included personal pride in one’s own university competing at the highest level and performing comparably against rivals, particularly regional rivals, and also that we should endeavour to offer our students the best sporting provision possible.
But my motivation had wider implications; effectively I viewed my university as a sporting organisation, thus we should be doing everything possible to not only increase levels of sporting participation amongst our customers (students), but also to try and raise the level of UK sporting performance as a whole by nurturing and developing high class athletes while they are studying.

Essentially, the top performing student athletes are going to be the ones we are cheering on at the next Olympics or major championships and cursing if they don’t win a medal, so shouldn’t UK HEIs have an obligation to do all they can to promote this cause?

I believe they should, but then maybe my view is biased through my passion for sport and my belief that this country has no excuse for not competing with the worlds sporting powers. Some country ‘down-under’ approximately 12,000 miles away with a third of the UK’s population can produce world class athletes seemingly at will, why can’t we?

This brings us back to the structure of UK university sport - does it promote an environment to develop our potential future champions of tomorrow? Is it healthy that so few HEIs absorb all available external funding, thus have all the best facilities and student athletes?

Surely it would be more beneficial for the development of UK sport to have many universities with world class provision suitable for the development of athletes and have them competing against each other rather than on the same team.

Sport development investment by universities is long overdue and very welcome in this writer’s opinion. Only time will show exactly what the results of this will be and whether or not university sport needs revamping from above, in much in the same way school sport has been recently.